Archives: August 2008

If you’ve been living under a rock for the past week, you may not have noticed that Michael Phelps has risen to become possibly the most popular athlete in American history over the weekend. On Facebook, Michael Phelps attracted almost 1 million fans over the past week and has grown to have the second most popular fan page on Facebook. The only person that Phelps has to contend with on Facebook is Barack Obama who currently has over 1.34 million fans.

Michael Phelps is catching up rapidly and with the help of Facebook, who has decided to promote the page at the top of the newsfeed today, there’s a good chance that Michael Phelps will soon be the most popular person on the site. The page is currently growing at around 20 fans a second so within a few hours, Phelps could theoretically be the most popular person on the site. We’ll have to see if the growth remains constant.

If you’d like to be part of making Michael Phelps the most popular person on Facebook, go check out the Michael Phelps fan page.

I think I’m way behind on this but today when searching for Facebook’s advanced search feature, I ended up empty handed. The new search page only displays search by name, school and company. Previously Facebook enabled users to use the advanced search utility to find people by practically all areas of a user’s profile. Now there appears to be no more advanced search feature. I searched the web and couldn’t find any reference to the removal but this is significant.

First, this emphasizes Facebook’s commitment to making the site a social utility to browse among your own friends. There is also no longer a link to browse for users within the new design. While you can access browse by going to the following page, it doesn’t appear to be accessible via any other method. There’s another component of the missing advanced search story which is a little more sinister. It appears that someone has successfully attempted to capitalize on advanced search gone missing.

An application called “Advanced Search” claims to enable users to search through over 80 million users on Facebook. How do they let you do that? Well in the past month alone close to 50,000 people have accessed this application. When you visit the app, it automatically populates a bunch of form fields with you name, gender, birthday, schools you’ve attended, companies you’ve worked at and more. It looks just like Facebook’s standard advanced search which misleads users into submitting their information.

This application would be extremely useful for any of the ad networks that wish to use profile data to target users. The other funny thing about this application? It doesn’t appear to actually provide any advanced search functionality. Instead it simply collects data. When you view the “advanced search application” it states “Welcome to Advanced Search for Facebook – Before you start searching, please check, update and store your details so that other people can search for you.”

It then prompts users to enter there info. If you don’t enter anything, it doesn’t display the search. Yikes! I’ve tried searching for more information on this application which has been popular since last October and I couldn’t find anything. Have you been able to find Facebook’s advanced feature? Have you tried this misleading application? Do you think it should be shut down?

It’s no secret that one of Facebook’s best sources for new employees is Google. Well, for the first time, one of those employees, Ben Ling, will be leaving Facebook to head back to Google. We previously reported that Ben Ling was leaving the company earlier this week but at the time we weren’t aware that he was returning back to Google. Nobody seems to know why he left back to Google but there’s no doubt that Ben definitely received some serious incentives.

Ben Ling previous had worked on developing Google Checkout but this time around he will be working on monetizing YouTube according to Kara Swisher. As many know, Google continues to face challenges monetizing YouTube, something that Facebook is not a stranger to. Facebook reportedly has significant problems with their monetization. These companies aren’t the only companies facing monetization issues but they are two of the most high profile companies.

As online companies try to search for a monetization model, one has to wonder why Ben Ling ended up moving back to Google when not even Facebook has found a solution. While we can speculate there is no way to know unless it comes from the horses mouth. It could be a cultural reason or it could have been for amazing incentives. Whatever the case, the shift is being made and the Google/Facebook employee battle continues.

Back in November of last year, a massive backlash ensued against Facebook for its failed attempt at releasing Beacon. Within weeks, the company decided to make the program opt-in, bowing to critics of the program. Well according to Nacy Gohring of IDG News Service, “A class-action suit filed in California charges Facebook and a handful of other companies, including Blockbuster, Fandango and Overstock, with violating online privacy and computer fraud laws related to Facebook’s controversial Beacon system.”

If you don’t remember the problem with Beacon, it was that all users were voluntarily registered for the program whether or not they knew it. Additionally, if you didn’t notice an alert in the corner of your screen that notified you of the Beacon alert being generated by your online activities, it would automatically publish the information after a period of time if you didn’t respond. Some even claimed that Facebook ruined Christmas after the holiday gifts that they purchased showed up in friends’ newsfeeds.

Facebook essentially turned off the program by making it opt-in but some people were not satisfied enough. “The suit asks the court to require Facebook and the other affiliate sites to delete any of the data they collected without user knowledge, award restitution to class members and return any ‘ill-gotten gains’ from the activities that allegedly violated privacy and fraud laws.” Other companies included in this suit are Hotwire, STA Travel, Zappos.com and Gamefly.

I’m not sure how the court will determined “ill-gotten gains” but at the least Facebook will have one more legal issue to manage. Honestly, this suit is a bit delayed but I guess better late then never, right?

I’m happy to announce a great list of speakers for the upcoming Social Ad Summit. We will be announcing more speakers in the coming week (a few which I’m personally extremely excited about) but I wanted to provide an update. We just recently began sending out invitations to the event so if you haven’t received one, do not worry, we will be sending them out over the coming week. Also, if you are not sure whether or not you have received one, fill out your information on the Social Ad Summit homepage. Here is an updated list of speakers that will be in attendance:

• Brian Morrissey, Digital Editor, AdWeek, Moderator
• Allen Stern, Center Networks, Moderator
• Martin Green, COO, Meebo
• Jeremy Helfand, Executive Vice President, Classmates.com
• David Berkowitz, Director of Emerging Media, 360i
• David Bear, Executive Director of Mobile & Social Media, Atmosphere BBDO
• Sam Wick, Head of Business Development, Userplane
• Seth Goldstein, Co-Founder and CEO, SocialMedia Networks
• Scott Rafer, CEO, Lookery
• Anu Shukla, Founder and CEO, Offerpal Media
• Chris Cunningham, Founder and CEO, Appssavvy
• Michael Lazerow, Founder and CEO, Buddy Media
• Gordon Peters, General Manager, SocialCash.com
• Sean Ammirati, Contributor at Read/Write/Web, Founder of mSpoke, Moderator
• Albert Lai, CEO, kontagent
• Ian Swanson, Co-Founder and CEO, Sometrics
• Cam Balzer, VP of Emerging Media, DoubleClick
• Hooman Radfar, CEO and Co-Founder, Clearspring
• Carnet Williams, CEO and Co-Founder, Sprout
• Ben Pashman, Vice President of Sales and Business Development, Gigya
• Alex Blum, CEO, KickApps
• Clara Shih, Salesforce

Also, thanks to the following sponsors who are making this event possible:

• Offerpal Media
• Social Cash
• Buddy Media
• SocialMedia
• AppsSavvy
• Sometrics
• KickApps
• Doubleclick

We are in the process of finalizing speakers and sponsors over the coming week. We will be sure to update this site with more information regarding the conference as it gets closer!

Last night Facebook rolled out a new feature to the newsfeed which enables users to filter the stories that are displayed. You can select to display only stories from specific applications or specific friend lists. This is an interesting feature but I’m not sure that it does all that is expected. Ultimately users want to be able to see more or less stories from specific applications and friend lists. This feature simply displays specific stories that you would like to see from one source.

Also, you are currently limited to the applications that you can filter from. For instance, I am only able to filter activities from within Events, Pages, Groups, FriendFeed and Google Reader. It would be awesome if users could select from any application or their bookmarked applications. Caroline McCarthy suggests that this is possibly a result of the applications that your friends have installed. Apparently my friends on Facebook are all geeks based on the applications showing in my feed!

Filtering feeds is going to become increasingly important as we begin seeing more news items. The model has yet to be perfected but Facebook is definitely taking the lead when it comes to trying various filtering models. Do you find these new filters to be useful?

One of the lacking features of the Facebook platform is the inability to modify groups and events from within applications. Eventually I also think it would be useful to add application support to actual event and group pages but for now developers have been granted the ability to create, modify and delete Facebook events via the API. In a blog post last night, Nathaniel Tucker wrote:

With an active session and the appropriate extended permissions, your application can manage your users’ schedules for any events created through your application. These events appear on their profiles alongside all their other events, so they can easily keep track of what’s coming up as well as invite more friends. Applications that could take advantage of this include those that manage personal events and those that host events.

This means that event focused applications such as concert applications and birthday applications can now assist users in maintaining their calendar through the events program. I could also see this eventually turn into a way to manage reminders for upcoming events. I’ve previously said that having a centralized contact list is important but based on this, it looks like Facebook could theoretically create a centralized calendar as well.

If you’d like more information on developing with events, check out Nathaniel Tucker’s post.

Benjamin Ling will be departing Facebook according to Eric Eldon. Ben Ling joined the company less than a year ago and is already on his way out the door. While the company continues to post record-breaking growth numbers, the company can’t seem to hold on to many of their executives. What’s the source of all the problems? It could simply be that some employees would prefer to take stock options and leave, but that doesn’t appear to be the case for Ling.

Eric Eldon questions the reasoning behind his departure. While many have suggested that the reason for the exits was that the new executives, primarily Cheryl Sandberg, were not getting along with the old execs, that doesn’t appear to be the case. One Facebook employee that I’ve talked to, spoke highly of Cheryl and said that the company is finally getting some order, whereas before there didn’t appear to be much order to the organization.

As the company expands, executives appear to be dropping like flies but that may not be the worst thing. Perhaps the company simply has an effective model for wiping out those that aren’t in it for the long-term. At this point it’s all speculation. Ben Ling has been effective at fostering good relationships outside the company. It will be interesting to see how Facebook’s relationships with external companies change with this new departure.

Facebook issued the following statement:

Facebook confirms that Ben Ling will be leaving the company in the coming weeks to pursue other interests. We wish him well and appreciate his great contributions to the early success of Facebook Platform. Platform is poised for continued growth and success and the company is on track to deliver the range of major initiatives announced last month at f8, including Facebook Connect, fbFund and the Great Apps and Application Verification programs. Each of these programs have a strong team of professionals focused on attracting the best developers to Facebook Platform, helping developers succeed on Platform, and helping users find and enjoy great applications on Facebook.

Facebook has launched a sponsored video ad offering as displayed in the image below.  The videos display on the right hand side of the homepage in the area that Facebook announced would have sponsors when the site was redesigned. The only thing that the company failed to mention was that those sponsorships would be videos. The videos also enable comments. You can then view the comments that your friends have posted pertaining to that video.

Jason Beckerman was able to get me a screenshot and I checked out the site and it displayed as pictured below. The ad no longer displays for me but I’m guessing it will reappear shortly. This could be Facebook testing it out as Jason states in the comment, but it’s clear that Facebook would like to enter the video advertising space. This positions Facebook directly against VideoEgg who is currently one of the leading video advertising solutions providers on the market.

Facebook should also be able to charge a premium for video ad placements. It’s exciting to see Facebook expand their advertising offerings. We will update you with any news pertaining to this new advertising offering shortly.

New statistics are out for comScore this month which reveal Facebook’s ongoing expansion has yet to slow. The company attracted over 132 million users over the year ending in June versus MySpace which attracted 117 million. The real story here is that the company continues to surge past the competitors internationally. In Latin America Facebook has grown over 1,000 percent over the past year, helping to catapult it’s worldwide growth to 153 percent in comparison to MySpace’s paltry 3 percent growth.

Read more on the Social Times